Home Sun

Monday

Tiny newborn wild rose leaves along the shore seem impervious to even hard frost.

• I retain enough of my childhood upbringing to have an occasional tinge of the religious rituals I followed faithfully in early years.  One of those, of course, was Lent, a season of deprivation meant to make Easter all the more glorious.  This year is practically a reenactment, as winter seems determined to make us appreciate better weather when it finally arrives.
• In less parochial terms, the solstice sun will be gladly welcomed as daylight outlasts darkness once more.   Obviously a few minutes more here or there do not add dramatically to Earth’s heating, but psychologically the next seasons are already in view, and all of them promise optimistic adventures.  Adjectives describing spring and summer are rarely depressing, and even fall _ inevitably tinged with sadness _ is more reflective than despairing.  Simply said, we are glad to see winter depart, even if that only occurs on a calendar.
• Equinox is the true start of the new year for those of us at this latitude, on this continent.  Once the latest blizzard snow melts away _ more quickly by far than would happen in January _ we will be back to the almost too rapid changeover from white and brown to glorious color.

Tuesday

Stubborn snow drifts from our recent ice blizzard resist the notion that spring has arrived. 

• As has happened for eons, weeks of mild weather were recently followed by deep frozen nights, inches of ice, and northern blasts of wind.  Bulbs and low plants were protected by blankets of snow, but some opening leaf buds have been blasted back into black crumbles.  Perhaps they can survive, perhaps their branches will be lost as well.
• It’s always good to be reminded of the capriciousness of nature.  I become too used to predictability and think it is normal.  After all, store hours are set, food is always available, my life attends seconds clipped by electronic quartz crystals.  Each day can be much the same, regardless of outside conditions, if I so choose.  I only need expose myself to what was once known as reality when I want to.  So a blizzard is a nice slap in the face delivered by fate, reminding me how lucky I usually am. 

Wednesday

Looks like an ancient Canadian trapper’s cabin, but just another remnant of Gold Coast Heritage on Lloyd Neck.

• I was taught to sing “Faith, hope and charity.”
• I suppose nowadays it goes “Greed, fear, and misery …”

Thursday

Unnoticed minuscule flowers carpet disturbed ground, getting a head start on the competition.

• Just when it had seemed this would be nearly a year without chill, like some late patron of opera, winter arrived with  flashy fanfare.  It was not so much days of snow, nor inches on the ground, nor sleet itself, nor even deep freeze the day after.  What annoyed was malingering and refusal to make way for the next stage of spring.
• Snowdrop flowers, delicate crocuses, half-up tulips, nearly-open daffodils were encased deep under a layer of solid ice.  They may have been the luckiest.  Exposed buds and leaves  were brutally eliminated by prolonged temperatures near the lowest of this year.  Now we wait and see what, if any, permanent damage has been done.
• Waiting for spring in March is a lot like waiting for utopia.  We keep hoping it will arrive any minute, and that perhaps there is a little we can do to guide it along, but soon enough all plans are smashed and we are cruelly reminded that reality is reality, and all the old patterns will always remain.  Old patterns will always triumph.  And, in spite of that, things will probably work out ok.

Friday

No blush of spring yet in these trees and woodlands.

• Even on the coldest days, in the strongest winds, under the bleakest skies, birdsong is becoming louder and more continuous.  No matter the conditions, birds are taking to flight, often in pairs.  Territoriality has broken out on the shoreline and around the bird feeder as the breeding season approaches.  Life may be tough, food may be hard to find, but the avian population is driven by instincts honed to the timings of sunrise and sunset.
• Bird watchers anxiously peer through binoculars to add new species to their life lists, or to reacquaint themselves with old friends.  Many marvelous guidebooks now provide an infinite resource for such hobbies.  I am less detail-oriented, perhaps because I now find that for each fact I acquire each day, I seem to forget a few others I used to know well.  My most important task has been to replace attitudes like “oh, it’s just some birds,”  with “wow, what a wonderful woodpecker!”

Saturday

Winter detritus litters high tide marks along a dormant beach as it awaits community cleanup.

“Hey Alice,” I call to a neighbor passing up the hill while walking her dog in the bright morning.  “Happy Spring!”

“Just thinking the same thing,” she replies, “although it’s sometimes hard to tell,” she continued, gesturing to the piles and sheets of snow all around.

“Yeah, this week we’re living up to being called the North Shore.  We were just visiting the South Shore yesterday and the white stuff is basically gone.”

“Well, my yard looks like the North Pole or Greenland,” notes Alice.

“Ours too.  And no matter how warm the sunlight, the air is going to stay cold until the ice goes away.  At least the sun is getting hot.”

“Don’t forget it’s out longer too,” she adds.  “I for one love daylight savings time, when the evenings have returned as useful parts of our day.”

“Me too.  Well, enjoy the day.”

“Oh, that’s easy enough, with April around the corner.  C’mon Duff,” she tugs her pet onward.

I wonder if it is still too early to get some pansies to brighten up our patio.  The sun says no, the ground and air say yes.  I think I’m gonna give this decision to the sun.

Sunday

Skunk cabbage blooms already beginning to shrivel as leaves begin unfolding.

Just might rain, or maybe snow

Might feel warm or sub zero

Might blow winds or calm as glass

Just might stay brown or green the grass

Just might  be brilliant, or thick fog

Might sprout flowers, mud might clog

Might be predicted or perverse

Just might get better, or get worse

Marching On

Monday

• Sometimes I fall back into the religious moods of my youth.  This time of year does remind me of Lent, a time of penance and deprivation before the full joy of Easter springs forth.  The weather promises wonderful things, then suddenly removes fine days as quickly as they have arrived, replaced with snow and cold and harsh windy rainstorms.  But always there is a gleam of promise in the near future.
• In another metaphor, perhaps it is that nature begins to wake from what seems a long coma.  Signs are everywhere if I look, from small buds to grand flowers and emerging green shoots.  The entire local environment is in renewed ferment, if I search deeply.  Just, perhaps, not moving quickly enough to suit my impatience.
• Magically, the mornings are darker and the evenings lighter.  Daylight savings time does not affect anything except people and their artificial hours, but perhaps even birds notice that the rhythms of those crazy humans have unexpectedly lurched an hour.  Or maybe everything ignores me as completely as I too often do everything.

Tuesday

• March always seems a youthful season, a screaming newborn infant, juiced with potential and fully formed aspirations, but difficult to deal with.  Whereas autumn can seem morose in spite of its colorful beauty, spring is culturally a time of hope and optimism, in spite of the actual external conditions that may hang around (here at least) through mid or late April.  Certainly the signs of life are everywhere, forcing their way restlessly from hibernation or seed. 
• Even heavily bundled up, I notice clumps of brilliant crocuses, glints of verdant tiny leaves, expanding buds fuzzing the outline of trees and shrubs.  If I pay more attention, on warmer days, there are solitary bees or other insects, and once in a while a swarm of gnats seemingly lost in the wilderness.  Life is awakening rapidly.  When I do not notice that, it is entirely my own failure of observation.  Another year, another spring, another launch into presumed happy times to come.

Wednesday

• It’s an ill wind that blows good to no one.
• Chill blustery gales at least make me appreciate my snug home. 

Thursday

• Spring has become my season of anticipation.  I anxiously watch daffodils and crocuses, garlic and chickweed, swans and ducks,  bees and gnats,  willows and maples,  as they progress day to day.  So much is happening, so much is unwrapping.  Santa Claus rides down the wind every night, leaving presents to observe the next morning.
• Sometimes it can get out of hand.  Why, I wonder, has the forsythia _ primed for weeks now _ not yet bloomed?  What is holding back the dandelions?  Who ordered this snow cover?  Too much worry, too much desire, and certainly an eroding memory which has jumbled up memories of what comes next.
• March is all about hope.  I accept that this is still mostly winter, and each indication to the contrary is a miracle.  April, on the other hand, is mostly disappointment that it is not quite May.  On equivalently nice days, March can seem benign, but next month can appear brutal.  All is determined by context and expectation.
• You may tell me I should anticipate less, expect nothing.  But I would answer doing so dulls and diminishes my happiness, perverse though it may be.  In the meantime, I am glad that March is finally here, dark mornings and all, blustery winds, chill frost, iced lands, with lovely gifts enough even for me if I simply open them with gratitude.

Friday

• Each year around this time it seems appropriate to write a paean to skunk cabbage.  This unnoticed and unrespected native flower inhabits bogs and creek beds,  pushing up its odd and disturbing fleshy flowers well before anything else.  It is immune to late freeze, because it generates its own heat.  And all summer it brightens what would otherwise be dark mud with brilliant large green leaves.
• But, precisely because of the conditions it requires, no one notices it.  I do not tramp through swamps with their clouds of insects.  I will not build a bog in my back yard to cultivate it.  It cannot be cooked, consumed, picked, nor really aesthetically appreciated.  But, for all that, I admire that it has found a niche in our modern world.  Not like the ragweed, taking advantage of humans disturbing soil, but able to flourish in all the dark hidden places that are just too much bother for us to rework to our needs.
• Note: the picture planned was not taken since everything is at the moment under several inches of ice.  This frozen field caused by an extreme high tide during a late spring storm.  

Saturday

“Hey, watch where you’re poking that thing,” comes the plaintive thin cry.

“Sorry, sorry, didn’t see you there, Alice” responds Rob Robin to the tiny daffodil he has almost pecked.  “Trying to find some unfrozen soil and not paying much attention.”

“You should have stayed away longer,” notes Alice, nodding in the chill breeze.

“You should have slept longer,” retorts Rob.

“Yeah, we’re all captives of capricious climate,” sings the flower.

“You can joke if you want.  For you it’s all a game.  You don’t even care if you’re covered in six inches of snow.  Me, I go hungry or worse.”

“I’m sure it will be better soon.  Here, you can try closer than that,” says Alice sympathetically.

“Thanks.  Sometimes it’s not so easy being the early bird …”

Sunday

Chilled snow frowns

Blinding sun smiles

Which, this day,

Shall I accept?

Desperately Seeking Solace

Monday

• My friends and I are now late sixties, early seventies, and we have generally accepted that each day represents borrowed time.  There are too many reminders to ignore.  Our role models mostly long gone, well-known public personalities dying unexpectedly, relatives and those we loved afflicted terribly or vanished. 
• Intellectually all lives are borrowed time.  Logically, we accept that we are mortal.  But viscerally, we expect to live at least one more day, one more year, one more always.  As personal times become more ominous, we often project our own fate onto the larger world, and see it crumbling like our own memories.
• Solace is easily found in this wonderful abundant culture.  Food, leisure, warmth, distraction abound even for those of few means, and for those with even slight affluence the daily feasts and entertainments are far better than those of any ancient emperors.  But nagging thoughts curdle occasionally.  Our importance has generally shrunk, we are often ignored, sometimes in the way, tolerated or taken for granted.  We shrink active spheres to grandchildren or volunteerism, all noble, but not world-changing in the ways we thought of affecting the universe when we were twenty.
• I get out with the sun and wind, listen to birds and waves, smile at passerbys in their hassled rush, enjoy the screams and laughs of children.  The news on various media is one vast soap opera. 
• Life remains good.  I adjust my mind.  Borrowed time, like borrowed money, can be a useful commodity.

Tuesday

• Compared to chattering civilization, nature seems secure and stately.  Hills and trees do not move, vistas seem wrapped in eternity, birds follow ancient scripts of activity and migration, seasons progress without variation year to year.  That perspective is comforting, but false.  Sand cliffs along the sound are eroding rapidly, even without the frequent incursion of humans, hills themselves are cut by streams, vistas disappear from view as forest grows larger, and the most ancient and massive trees eventually fall.  Bird patterns are harder to determine, but mixes and ranges of species change all the time.
• The biologic term for rapid change in the global environment is “punctuated equilibrium.”  As long as things remain relatively steady, there is an orderly progression of life into various niches.  But on occasion, probably including the period we are living through, there are immediate far-reaching losses and opportunities.  After the nearly tropical winter we have been experiencing, I begin to wonder if in a decade we may see palm trees lining the harbors here.  Extinctions are numerous.  Great chunks of ecology have been erased _ particularly isolated pockets of uniqueness _ but vast common opportunities such as city and suburb have been opened up.  I try to accept all that without too much sadness, just as I try to remember vanished ancient social patterns of my youth without regret.

Wednesday

• It can’t happen here.  It won’t happen here
• It might happen here.

Thursday

• We are now in the midst of the Bannon administration.  The president is an ignorant bitter old miser, who enjoys performing mean-spirited stand-up comedy.  Some see Steve Bannon as Hitler, he sees himself as Savonarola. I view him as Rasputin.
• He’s beefing up ICE, a massive centralized police force answering to no one, which can act without warrants on mere suspicion, arrest people without cause, hold presumed-guilty arrestees indefinitely in concentration camps _ oops, make that “detention centers” _ until they can prove their innocence, ship the “guilty” off to probable death.   Probably soon all non-citizens will be required to wear some badge such as a yellow star when they are in public.  He encourages neighbors to report neighbors, just as Stalin-era children were encouraged to report parents.
• In Russia, in 1913, nobody could foresee that in ten years they would be in the middle of a communal experiment, that another decade would bring mass famine and gulag slavery.  In Weimar German, few suspected that in ten years they would be living in a terrorist dictatorship, nor that a decade later everything would lie in ruins all around them.  Societies can change faster than we think.
• Bannon has massively armed private armies _ oops, make that “citizen militias” _ that he can muster to clear the streets of opposition.  He screams epithets at immigrants and other scapegoat groups to direct the anger of his alt-right followers towards a simple reason for their troubles and failures.  He publicly declares that he wants to destroy everything that has made America the beacon of the world following World War II.  He performs his black-magic rites and whispers evil persistently into the empty shell of his nominal ruler.
• It can happen here.  It is happening here.

Friday

• Late winter salt marsh lies dormant and soggy, under heavy skies, continually filled with the salty pump of the tides.  A quiet place, abandoned even by waterfowl.  In another month, standing in this spot will become uncomfortable with clouds of gnats, to be followed by swarms of mosquitoes, but right now insects bide their time in winter storage.  So there are only patterns of color, contrasts of blue and brown, interesting reflections and rotting signs of older usage such as fence posts along the drainage ditches.
• People too are absent this afternoon.  I have as much solitude as is possible in this little overcrowded corner of the Northeast.  I’m grateful for such unexpected moments, which I didn’t even know I needed until they came upon me.  Away from the worries, and the hassles, and the chatter, I can imagine that the world goes on calmly as always, that it is greater than me and my trivial concerns, that the sheer mass of what exists can overcome transient stupidity.  Easy to believe, alongside this marsh.  Doubts will return as I head home.

Saturday

Starlings have swept into the backyard like a ravaging horde, emptying the bird feeders in less than an hour, thick in the trees, making a terrific unmusical racket.  “Karl, hey Karl!  What’s been going on?” shouts one glistening blue-black marauder to another.

“Usual, usual.  Clogging old maple trees in town, coating the cars underneath with well-placed shots, making patterns in the sky.  Been a good winter.”

“Sure has.  I don’t think I’ve been hungry an hour.”

“And cold?  No cold.  Why, this is almost as good as my aunt Burga describes Rome itself.”

“Ah, they’re always talking about the old country, aren’t they?”

“We’re just as good here, this season.  Wow, these idiots put out some kind of spread, don’t they?”

“Hey! You!!  Get out of here!!!” screams Wilhelm, jerking menacingly towards a terrified chickadee trying to grab a seed.  “Stupid little things act like they own the place.”

The flock takes up the common squawk,  and as the din reaches a crescendo, all wing off together to see if there might be more fun somewhere else.

Sunday

Each twelve hours, more or less

Surging tides relentlessly

Smooth sand shores with waves blown free

Leave no signatures to guess

What went before, to touch smell see

My random shards of memory

Resist oblivion’s soft process

No simple tale for history’s key

Like flashing ripples of bright sun

May blind my eyes but quickly done

Nevermore exactly run

Identical, yet ceaselessly

All transient in time’s caress

Hello, Lion!

Monday

• Old proverbs and sayings are rarely examined for truth.  Most of them, examined logically, are incomprehensibly wrong.  “Darkest right before dawn”, “a penny saved”,  “what doesn’t kill you”, and, possibly the worst: “things work out for the best.”  But right up there is “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.”  Around here, March does what it darn well pleases, any given hour, day or week.  It is possibly the most fickle month of the year, and generally shows no progression to mildness.
• Possibly for that reason, it seems such old sayings are dying out with my generation.  Newer and more applicable memes _ some just as insanely wrong, of course _ are coined daily from rap music and media sound-bites.  It’s been a long while since I’ve heard people except those my age quoting an old proverb, or applying a nursery rhyme to a situation.
• To be sure, that is not much of a loss, although it represents just one more part of a once tightly-knit common culture fraying rapidly.  Undoubtedly a new binding of attitudes is taking its place among the young, but that is hardly comforting to those of us who feel more and more cut off from our roots.  I still think of March lions, and April showers, and merry May, and feel mild regret that my children don’t have the faintest idea what I am talking about.

Tuesday

• As an occasional day turns warmer, sun begins to burn pale skin, and light extends into the evening, the quest for signs of spring and coming seasons becomes almost obsessive.  New garlic clumps are glowing green, after all, and early bulbs like crocuses can burst forth from improbable locations.  Brambles and other vines are ready to green and fuzz with opening leaves.  Birds frolic and couple and once in a while there is even a poor misdirected insect wandering about.
• I pursue in an extreme up and down pattern.  Days filled with indications of astonishingly rapid vitality are followed by a week of cold grey stasis.  I’m grateful for the first swatches of color, but too quickly search for more.  I keep confusing this last month of winter with the first post-solstice months of spring, which have their own issues confounding my expectations.  I need to slow down, more than ever, and just enjoy the moments as they occur for what they are, never for what I hope and imagine they might become. 

Wednesday

• Maybe it’s just my age, but lately tempus seems to fugiting much too quickly.
• This year, winter appears to be leaving before it truly arrived.

Thursday

• Boomers grew up into an American-dominated world.  Most of us thought it would always be that way, and that we would end up in the fifties-type society inhabited by our parents, without having to endure a depression or world war (unless WWIII killed us all.)
• Lower middle class kids expected decent stable jobs with ongoing raises and more and more consumer products, a nice house in the suburbs, new cars every few years.  Upper middle class kids were indoctrinated as the best and the brightest, the glowing hopes of the world, stuffed with history and culture and science in the hopes of producing perfect little humans leading the way into a utopian millennium.
• We tried to know an awful lot about the past.  That didn’t help us survive adulthood or get a good job.
• So modern students concentrate on networking, the immediate, the here and now, never mind all that ancient boring garbage.  Morality is what fits today.  Survival is what happens in the next week.  Perhaps they are right.
• I survey the world and am worried.  Well, that’s been the role of seniors since at least the dawn of agricultural civilization, when people could grow old.  My complaints mean as little as those of any other geezers in the last few thousand years.  For better or worse, it’s up to the kids now.  If only the ancient crones who desperately clutch powerful jobs would die or retire and get out of the way.  

Friday

• Around now each year the willows begin to bud, fluffy and white, some peeking out timidly, some boldly bursting into display no matter what the temperature.  Grass which has browned and died back under layers of snow shows blushes of green.  There seems to be a (sometimes imaginary) haze of emerald or scarlet surrounding briar patches.  And already there has been at least one crocus open, while daffodils thrust restlessly with swollen buds.
• Often in early March these first signs of breaking winter are welcome and almost incongruent to the hostile environment.  This year has been one of thaw and heat wave, worrisome if you are concerned about planetary warming, otherwise locally welcome.  At the moment, I am more concerned that exposure can be shattered by some still-possible event.  Deep freeze can destroy flowers and leaves,  trees with buds swelling are increasingly vulnerable to heavy wet snow.  But _ hey, I’m just a passenger _ so I watch and enjoy and marvel and am grateful for being able to wander freely outside as many hours as I desire.

Saturday

Sun beams proudly among his peers.  “Look what my clever local intelligence has accomplished,” he boasts to friend star Trapp.  “They’ve discovered all your planets already.  What are your lifeforms doing?”

“Still slime and acids, I’m afraid,” responds Trapp timidly.  “Haven’t had as much time as yours, you know.”

“Don’t let him bully you,” chimes in Epsili.  “Water-based intelligence is a transitory phenomenon,  hardly worth noticing anywhere.  How long have your creatures been clever, Sun, if you can even call them that?”

“Well, they can trace their lineage back billions …” Sun hesitates.

“None of that now,” thunders Sirius.  “The actual creatures, the ones who supposedly found Trapp’s stuff.”

“At least a million planetary year cycles …”

“Yeah, yeah,” taunts Epsili.  “But how long with tools and social organization to actually look up and think about things?”

“A few tens of thousands ..”

“And with capability to look at Trapp and his planets?”

“Depends.  Maybe ten thousand, maybe a few hundred, I don’t know.  But they are clever now!” shouts Sun defiantly.

“Flash in the pan.  I’m willing to bet my Jovian giant that they’ve completely vanished in less than a century.”

Unfortunately, there are no takers.

Sunday

Social storms spew strife

Anger encases weep

Each morn worse than ever

Nature spins bright life

Always calm and deep

Sustaining genes’ endeavor

I know there’s no forever

Escaping mortal knife

But these times trouble sleep